The buttons (and others) were on display in
Columbia's Rare
Book and Manuscript Library on the 6th floor of Butler Library, Chang
Room, March 17 - June 6, 2008, in an exhibition commemorating the 40th
anniversity of the 1968 uprising. In July 2011 they were added to the
permanent collection.

A personal reminiscence of the 1968 student uprising at Columbia University.
I was an active participant, but not a member of any particular faction (the
only organization I belonged to was Veterans Against the War). I wrote this
article for publication in the "Columbia Librarian" at the request of
Columbia's Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian,
Elaine Sloan (then my boss's boss), on the 30th anniversary of the student
rebellion (a). In 1968 I was an Army veteran
working my way through a Columbia degree with a student casual job in the
library; in 1998 I worked in Academic Information Systems (the academic half
of what used to be called the Computer Center),
which, after 1986, was part of the University Library; hence the library
connection (now the two are back together as CUIT - Columbia University
Information Technology).

Because this article was written for a Columbia audience, familiarity with
the Columbia
campus and setting are assumed. The article was placed on the Web and
slightly updated in February 2001, with periodic updates after that.
Pictures were added in June 2001, which you can view by following the links
or by clicking on VIEW ALL IMAGES above; I hope to find and add more
pictures as time goes on, but I've been saying that for years. While this
is a personal recollection and not an attempt at a definitive history,
corrections, comments, additional information, and especially photos are
welcome, and will be acknowledged.

May 31, 2011: This page and its sub-pages and images were moved from
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/ to
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/. On July 1, 2011, my 45 years
at Columbia came to a close.

Prelude

Life was different at Columbia University in 1968. There was a war
and a draft. Up until the previous year, the University had routinely
furnished class rank lists to the draft board (b),
so if you had poor grades, off you went (of course, privileged Columbia
students still had it better than the many kids drafted right out of high
school, but that's another story). There were ROTC drills on South Field,
military and CIA recruiters on campus, and classified military research in the
labs (c). The Civil Rights movement had become
the Black Liberation movement, and Black Panthers
and
Young Lords
(h)
(see them today)
– and Soul
music – captured students' imaginations. The women's movement was
beginning to shake everybody up, especially guys who thought they were
already progressive enough. Dr. King
had just been killed and the cities were in flames. You couldn't ignore all
this.

Throughout the mid-to-late 60s there was all sorts of political activity on
campus – teach-ins on Pentagon
economics, Sundial rallies against the war, demonstrations against class
rank reporting, confrontations with military recruiters, etc. It was an era
of bullhorns. Amidst all this, the University was constructing a new gym in
Morningside Park – the barrier separating Columbia from Harlem –
with a "back door" on the Harlem side. This offended many people, and one
day in April some students went to Morningside Drive and tore down the fence, attempting to break into the
construction site. They were restrained by police and some were arrested.
The ensuing Sundial rally wandered into Hamilton Hall and stayed the night.
The original idea was that the united student body, or at least the
considerable left wing of it would occupy Hamilton until the charges against
the students were dropped and some other demands were met. Various factions
debated tactics and what the demands should be. Eventually six demands
were formulated. Their thrust was against Columbia's complicity the war,
against racism, and for better and more responsible relations with the
surrounding communities.

The First Building Occupations

About 6:00am the white students left Hamilton and moved into the President's
office in Low Library, while the Black students
remained in Hamilton. This was the result of an agreement reached
between leaders of SDS, PL, SWP, YAWF, etc (the predominantly white groups),
on the one hand, and SAS on the other, behind closed doors and reflective of
the tenor of times [1]. Over the next few
days the various mostly-white factions branched out to other buildings
– SDS to Math (which flew the splendid red
flag featured on the cover of Spring 1968 Columbia College
Today*, an issue devoted to the uprising with lots of great photos and
much grouchy commentary), the Trotskyites to Avery, the anarcho-syndicalists
to Fayerweather, etc (or something like that). In all, five buildings were
occupied for a week. The history is written elsewhere such as the
souvenir-bound editions of Spectator, and there is also a locally-produced
film, Columbia Revolt (shot in large part by the legendary wall-scaling Melvin), that is trotted out on
special occasions. When I took my son to see it at the 20th anniversary
get-together in Earl Hall in 1988, it was already crumbling. (As of
February 2003, there seems to be a copy available for viewing and
downloading at Archive.Org; see Links.)

*

As of May 2013, the Spring 1968 issue of Columbia College Today
is online HERE
in some kind of strange, nonportable, semi-animated multimedia format in
black and white only. You'll need a large screen, and to maximize your
browser, to read it. The narrative is emphatically anti-uprising (and often
dishonest), but the photographs are invaluable.

I spent the week in Low Library. There was a
carnival atmosphere the first day, with press photographers and reporters from
magazines, the local newspapers, etc (the Post was fair, the
News was atrocious, but the Times was beyond belief
– small wonder, considering the connections (d)).
There was an unforgettable, Felliniesque visit from a
faculty member who swooped through the window in full
academic regalia, Batmanlike, to "reason" with us. Security guards and
office workers brought us snacks. Life magazine (May 10, 1968)
ran a cover story featuring pictures taken in Low, including my favorite: a
group of us seated on the carpet, each with a Grayson Kirk face, complete with
pipe (from President Kirk's desk drawer, which was stocked with dozens of 8x10
glossy book-jacket poses).

After the first day, activities grew more structured, and thenceforth the
occupation was one long meeting governed by Robert's Rules of Order,
interpreted creatively ("point of obfuscation!"), interspersed by housework.
Contrary to popular belief and press reports, the President's suite of offices
was kept immaculate and orderly after the chaotic first day
(e). Cleanup
detail included vacuuming, shaking out blankets,
scrubbing the bathroom, etc. The administration's fears of vandalism (and
their special concern for the Rembrandt hanging above President Kirk's desk)
were poorly founded, at least in Low.

Outside, a system of rings developed around Low
Library. Opponents ("jocks") formed the inner ring; student supporters
(known, along with us, as
"pukes")
formed an outer ring, and later concerned
faculty formed an intermediate buffer ring. Each group wore distinctive
armbands, not that they were needed: jocks (Columbia light blue) looked like
jocks; pukes (red) were scruffy; faculty (white) wore tweed with elbow
patches. Black armbands came later. Beyond the rings were crowds of
onlookers and press. The outside pukes would try to send food up to us, but
the jocks intercepted most of it and made a great show of wolfing it down
con mucho gusto as we looked on with envy (most food didn't throw well
and fell short; what little got through was mainly oranges and baloney
packets). One day a tall stranger with waist-length hair appeared at the
distant fringe of the crowd (almost all the way to
Earl Hall) and began to hurl five-pound bags of home-made fried chicken
our way, one after another, with perfect aim, over the jocks' heads and right
into our windows. What an arm! (The chicken was cooked by Mrs. Gloria
Sánchez of the Bronx, and it was delicious; I never learned the
identity of the mysterious stranger.)

. . . Until June 1, 2001, when I had a call from Jerry Kisslinger of
Columbia's Office of University Development and Alumni Relations, who
recognized the waist-length hair and powerful arm of John Taylor, son of
Nürnberg prosecutor and Columbia Law Professor Telford Taylor (who
declined to lend his name to a statement signed by most other
Law School faculty, which said the student protests exceeded the
"allowable limits" of civil disobedience [New York Times, 24 May 1998]).
Thanks to both John and his dad!

Aside from the meetings and work details, a concerted effort was made to rifle
through the many file cabinets and turn up evidence of covert links with the
war machine and defense contractors, large corporations planning to divide up
the spoils in Viet Nam, etc, all of which were to be found in abundance.
These were photocopied and later published in the East Village underground
newspaper, Rat. Some items were picked
up by the mainstream press, resulting in some embarrassment among the rich and
powerful, which quickly passed.

The First Bust

After a few days, the NYC Tactical Police Force (TPF, of distinctive leather
cladding)(f) muscled through the crowd and the
rings to form a new inner ring just below our feet as we congregated on the
ledges and windowsills. Police on Campus! Academia violated! (A famous photo shows Alma Mater holding a sign, "Raped by
Cops".) We fortified the entrances to the occupied buildings, especially
through the tunnels,
against the expected assault.

Which, inevitably, came. After the final warning to vacate or be arrested, we
discussed (still observing proper parliamentary procedure) whether to resist
or go peacefully. Opinion was divided and many variations were proposed.
After much discussion, consensus converged on civil-rights-movement-style
passive resistance; we would go limp and the police would have to carry us
out.

We devoted the final moments to preparations – the Defense Committee piled
furniture up against door, while the rest of us picked up trash, vacuumed, and
scrubbed so the President's suite would be left in pristine condition, better
than we had found it (except for tape criss-crossed on
the window glass and the jimmied file-cabinet locks). Those with pierced
earrings took them off (a routine precaution in those days of police actions)
and then we formed a 100-person, 10,000-pound clump singing "We Shall Not Be
Moved", knowing that we would.

Soon axes were crashing through the door, the barricade was breached, and an
army of TPF piled in, first prying apart the singing clump of us, then forming
a gauntlet to pass our limp bodies down the corridors,
whacking our heads with flashlights along the way, and
dragging us by the feet down the marble steps so our heads bounced.
Superficial head wounds are harmless but they bleed a lot, and journalists got
some terrific photos of us on our way to the paddy
wagons waiting on College Walk.

Soon we were in the Tombs [the jail and criminal court building at 100
Centre Street]. I was in a cell with six others including Tom Hayden (one of many luminaries who visited and/or
sat in with us – others included H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael,
Charles 37X Kenyatta, I forget who else – Angela Davis? Che
Guevara?). Later, students from the other buildings began to arrive, much
bloodier than we were. The students in Math (some of whom – the ones
who weren't killed in the 1970 East 11th Street
townhouse explosion – later went on to the Democratic convention in Chicago, and then formed
the Weather
Underground) received less gentle treatment – one student was
thrown from a second-story window and landed on a professor (Jim
Shenton), breaking the professor's arm.

In December 2001 I received the following email from Thomas Gucciardi: "My
dad, Frank Gucciardi, was a cop during the
riots. He was paralyzed from the waist down for 3 years. (A student jumped
off a building into the crowd) He has had a miraculous recovery & still
enjoys a fairly active life. I just found your site & commend you on it. My
dad till this day loved his job & he does understand the students
uprising. He holds no grudges at all for what the students did to him at 34
years of age & having 3 children. Thank you for your website." Later
Thomas sent copies of newspaper clippings that told how Patrolman Gucciardi
had been inured when an unidentified white student jumped from the balcony of Hamilton Hall, landing on
the officer's back as he bent over to pick up his hat, and of the operations
on his spine over the next several years. A series of articles by columnist
Martin Gershen in the NY Times, the Long Island Press, and other papers,
followed his progress and gained national attention. Also injured was Officer
Bernard Wease, kicked in the chest by a student in Fayerweather Hall while
giving the vacate-or-be-arrested order, causing damage to his heart.

While an article in the LA Times, 9 September 1969, quotes Mayor Lindsay as
acknowledging that some police used "excessive force" and states that "news
reports quoted witnesses as having seen nonuniformed policemen punching and
kicking both male and female students... one blond girl was said to have been
beaten unconscious on the sidewalk in front of Avery Hall... a boy left
writhing in front of Ferris Booth Hall with his nose smashed...", the only two
injuries serious enough to require prolonged hospitalization were to Officers
Gucciardi and Wease.

Many of the later arrivals to the Tombs were bystanders. All hell had
broken loose after we left, with mounted police charging through the crowds
on South Field, swinging their "batons" at all nearby heads like rampaging
Cossacks (NEED PHOTO). Subsequent investigative commissions called it a
"police riot." The combat spilled out to Broadway and down the side streets
towards Riverside Park, horses galloping after fleeing pedestrians –
it must have been quite a sight (too bad I missed it), and it was a
"radicalizing experience" for many former sideliners. Ed
Kent (UTS BD 1959, Columbia PhD 1965, currently professor of
moral / political / legal philosophy at Brooklyn College, CUNY)
recalls:

I made sure that I put on a coat and tie – it was about 1 a.m. and I
had been alerted by a colleague at Hunter who had heard the bust was
imminent. I then joined the cop assigned to the gate who was entirely
sympathetic to the students and we watched with horror as the cops beat
up kids that had come out of their dorms to find out what all the ruckus
was about (Those occupying buildings had been taken out through the
tunnels earlier.). I will never forget one small sized student being
chased by a group of cops with clubs intent on beating him up – he
finally took refuge on top of a car where he tried to avoid their
swings. They finally knocked him off and pounced with their clubs. The
next day many faculty and students were treated for head and other
injuries – all of them innocent of any connection with the actual
building occupations. Incidentally at the Cox hearings I heard the dean
[Henry Coleman]
who had supposedly been imprisoned by the students in Hamilton admit in
response to a question by Anthony Amsterdam that he had in fact been
ordered by the President to remain in his office and had been treated
with entire courtesy by the students throughout and could have unlocked his
office door (and relocked it to protect student records) and left at any
time. This was given as the excuse for the police action and Sidney Hook
refused to take it out of his book account (I got his galleys to pre-view)
although I personally drew his attention to his mis-reporting there. Hook
had become very right wing by then.

Meanwhile, back in jail... Escorting a group of incoming wounded was a fellow
worker from Butler Library, now wearing a badge. In Butler, posing as a
student library assistant, he had been trying to recruit us to "blow stuff
up". Luckily he had been an inspiration to no one, but the episode served
well for many years in discussions of leftist paranoia. The librarians, to
their credit, were shocked to learn they had hired an agent provocateur and
fired him immediately, not so very inhumane considering his better-paying day
job.

Some 700 people were arrested that night, a logistical nightmare, involving
at least 20 precincts and much transportation. We were arraigned and
released over the next day or two, with court dates set that would stretch
for years into the future, a story in itself. Back on campus... what a
mess! The morning's newspapers were full of it. The Times ran
a front-page story with a photo of a police officer standing in the
President's Office, which was a total wreck (mean-spirited graffiti sprayed
on the walls, bookshelves toppled, etc), gesturing sorrowfully towards a
mound of mangled books, a forlorn tear in his eye: "The world's knowledge
was in those books...". Ironic because it was not us who made the mess and
sprayed the graffiti! We caught the author (Sylvan Fox) of the story on
campus and asked why he had written such dreck when he had been witness to
the whole episode – he freely admitted it was a pack of lies and
recommended we complain to his boss (a Columbia trustee). Luckily for
posterity, whoever wrecked the office after we left overlooked the
Rembrandt.

Community issues loomed large – an apartment
building on 114th Street was the scene of a second occupation a couple
weeks later, in which several hundred of the newly radicalized onlookers
from South Field took part and were promptly arrested (I don't recall
exactly what the issue was, but housing has always been a touchy topic at
Columbia). On May 22nd, sensing no movement in the administration on the
issues of the strike, we went back into Hamilton (déjà
vu was the rallying cry). This time the police were summoned onto
campus without hesitation, and back we all went to jail (there were 1100
arrests in all). By now it was like commuting. Again, campus erupted after
we left – this time, 15-foot-high barricades were erected at the main
gates and set ablaze (SEE GALLERY), windows were
smashed, cars crushed, crowds surged back and forth, and many heads were
bashed – most of them attached to innocent bystanders. As in the
first bust, the police again did a fair amount
of mischief aimed at discrediting the strikers.

Commencement and Beyond

The year ended with most of the Class of '68 walking
out of graduation, which was at Saint John's that year, on a prearranged
signal – students carried radios under their gowns and walked out when
WKCR played "The Times They Are A'Changin'" – to a countercommencement
on Low Plaza, accompanied by loud rock music, and from there to Morningside Park for a big picnic that turned out
rather well.

At Columbia, classified war research was halted, the gym was canceled, ROTC
left campus, military and CIA recruiting stopped, and (not that anybody asked
for it) the Senate was established. Robert Kennedy, the antiwar presidential
candidate, was killed in June 1968, and later that month the French uprising
was "voted away" in a national referendum. Mexican students and supporters
and bystanders were slaughtered wholesale in October, in
La Noche de
Tlatelolco. Columbia antiwar rallies continued, and large Columbia
contingents chartered buses for the huge demonstrations
in Washington, of which there were to be far too many – the war dragged
on for another seven years. To this day, I don't know if all the antiwar
activities combined had as much affect as the Vietnamese figuring out how to
shoot down the American B-52s that were carpet-bombing their cities.

The Cox commission produced a report on the
disturbances. Springtime building occupations continued for the next few
years, but eventually were replaced by disco. Then came the 80s and 90s: the
rich became richer at the expense of everyone else; organized labor was
squashed; most real jobs were exported; drugs and greed ruled; social
awareness was replaced by political correctness, student activism by ambition,
and real work by sitting in front of a PC clicking on investments.

After a semester's suspension and dozens of court appearances (but
no hard time – thanks National
Lawyers Guild!), I received my BA in 1970, held a number of odd jobs
(taxi driver, etc; nobody pays you to save the world), and eventually wound
up back at Columbia getting a graduate degree in computer science and
working in what was called the Computer Center,
where I still work today worked until 2011. And now,
thanks to the Information Age, the Computer Center has been absorbed by the
University Library and I suppose that brings us full circle(g).

Afterword

Much can be said (and has been) about the strike's effects on Columbia
University. Of course it hurt the University in many ways –
applications, endowment, contracts & grants, gifts, and so on. It took
at least 20 years to fully recover. Perhaps it strengthened the University
in other ways, who knows.

Most press accounts of the time focus on the strike leaders, their
affiliations and temperaments and hairstyles, but honestly, I don't recall
them being a major force, except on the first night when they decided the
white students should leave Hamilton Hall. They certainly didn't choreograph
the events after that. Actions were either taken spontaneously, or discussed
to death by EVERYBODY until consensus was reached, in the manner of the day
(and night!). In Low library, leadership meant nothing more than fairly
moderating the open discussion and applying Robert's Rules – a
process not nearly as interesting to the media as sound bites from
high-profile personalities.

I never felt the strike was motivated primarily by antipathy towards Columbia.
After all, students came here voluntarily and received good educations (often
obtaining their introduction to radical thought from their own professors) and
– even in those days – the student body, if not faculty and administration,
was among the most diverse anywhere. Community relations were not all
bad: many of us were
Project
Double Discovery counselors or involved in various Columbia-sponsored
Harlem community action projects.

Rather, it was a case of students doing the best they could in the place where
they were to stop the war in Viet Nam and fight racism at home, just as they
hoped others would do in other places: in the streets, factories, offices,
other universities, the military itself, the court of world opinion, and
finally in the seats of government. Whether this was the best way to do it is
debatable, but it is clear that the more
polite methods of previous years
were not working, and every DAY that passed cost 2000 lives in
Southeast Asia. So to the extent that the Columbia strike hastened the end of
the war, it was worthwhile. As to racism and community relations, it's not my
place to judge.

After-Afterword

Maybe I was being too polite above when I said students weren't motivated
antipathy towards Columbia. Students had legitimate grievances and tried
repeatedly to get through to the administration with no success. The
University was complicit in the Viet Nam war (e.g. in the “automated
battlefield” from which the Vietnamese continue to suffer to this
day), and its behavior towards its neighbors was arrogant, patronizing, and
bellicose. The University administration never appreciated its
African-American, Dominican, and Puerto Rican neighbors in Harlem and
Manhattan Valley. The administration's door was closed and in the end,
students were placed on probation for trying to get in to speak with
President Kirk about these issues.

By 2010 or so, Columbia had prevailed in every way over its critics. The
surrounding neighborhoods are gentrified to the extent that only hedge-fund
managers can afford to live in them. Harlem as we knew it is vanishing;
Columbia bought up the buildings and either raised the rents or turned them
into luxury condominiums and then gave low-interest loans to Columbia
faculty to buy them. Industrial West Harlem ("Manhattanville") has been
flattened to make way for a new Columbia campus. Today, students enter
Columbia to become Masters of the Universe, not to learn about real life and
then leave equipped to make the world a better place.

Sometimes I wonder why I wasn't more involved in SDS; if I had been, my life
would have been quite different after nearly everybody I knew went off to
Chicago in 1969 and then underground. I noticed recently that Wikipedia
pages have appeared about many of my friends from those days: Ted Gold, JJ,
and others I won't name because they are still alive. Reading them, it
suddenly dawns on me after all these years: as a returning veteran putting
myself through college, often working 60 hours a week* in addition to taking
a full course load, I simply never had the free time for all the meetings.
Teddy and JJ and many others, on the other hand, probably didn't have to work.
____________________________* The Vietnam-era GI Bill paid a measly $100 a month.

Notes

Big demonstrations and other actions in 1967 persuaded Columbia's
administration to stop turning over class rank lists to Selective Service, in
defiance of US policy, if not law. Fast forward 35 years to when Columbia
announced plans to send regular reports about each foreign student to the
Immigration and Naturalization Service (not just residence and visa status but
also detailed academic information) and not a peep was heard from anybody.
In the intervening years Columbia had often refused to provide information
such as students' reading preferences to the FBI as a matter of principle,
even without student prodding.

These things are not intrinsically bad; you have to take them in
context. For example, see the 1940s section of my Computing at Columbia
Timeline. It's one thing to fight Fascism and genocide (if that's what
we were doing) but Viet Nam was something else again, and Columbia was tied
to the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) which conducted classified war
and weapons research for the Pentagon, e.g. on the "automated battlefield"
and defoliation, from which the Vietnamese (not to mention American veterans
and other field personnel) are still suffering (as will be the case with
depleted uranium and burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan). Six weeks prior to
the Columbia strike, a petition bearing nearly 2000 signatures calling on
Columbia to cease classified war research was brought to the President's
office; the University responded by placing the students who presented it on
disciplinary probation.

The Times managing editors were also Columbia Trustees.

Press and photographers were allowed into the President's office the first
day, when it was messy, and this was the only view the public had (most
famously from the May 10th Life issue). The mainstream press
was barred after that because of their fixation on silliness, like the
student who was smoking the President's cigars,
rather than the issues of the strike.

In retrospect, perhaps the leather-clad police were not TPF
after all, but a detachment of motorcycle police brought in temporarily
until the TPF arrived.

Nothing lasts forever. In
2005, academic computing was severed from
the Libraries and rejoined to administrative computing.

The Young Lords.... My mind might be a little fuzzy about this because I
read today (16 July 2009) in El Diaro that Summer 2009 is the 40th
anniversary of the founding of the Young Lords, so it would seem they were
not on campus (or, rather, like the Black Panthers, in front of the main
gate on Broadway) in the prelude to the 1968 strike, at least not formally.
(The article is Reflexiones sobre 40 años de los Young Lords by Iris
Morales, one the founders. By the way, I recommend that everybody who cares
about reading world and local news that has not been censored and sanitized
by the corporate media, and that treats Latin America and its new
progressive governments with respect instead of dirision, learn Spanish;
you'll be surprised and amazed. Print journalism is not dead, just the
anglo version.) (Update June 2014: El Diario was just snapped up by
a group that characterized it as a “ghetto newspaper” that needed
to “elevate its standards and pursue more highly educated
readers”.)

References

Naison, Mark D.,
White
Boy: A Memoir
Temple University Press, Philadelphia (2002). This book includes the most
vivid, accurate, and honest account of the Columbia scene in the 1960s that I
have encountered. By focusing on the painful racial issues behind the events
of 1968, it shows not just what happened, but why, and it captures the
passions, stresses, sights, sounds, and smells of that time and place like
nothing else I've read.

Who Rules
Columbia?, North American Congress on Latin America, 475
Riverside Drive, NYC (1970). "If you depended on major media,
all you knew about Columbia University in 1968 was that Mark Rudd, SDS, and
some long-haired students became spontaneously restless. In fact, a major
study of Columbia's role in the community and in the world was produced by
these students. This is NACLA's reprint of the original 1968
edition. 'Strawberry Statement' is cute, but here's the beef."
(NameBase, A Cumulative Index
of Books and Clippings)

Gillies, Kevin,The Last Radical
Vancouver Magazine, November 1998. A retrospective of the life of "JJ",
John Jacobs, who died in 1997. This
article disappeared from their website some years ago and I had not had the
sense to archive it locally. In June 2013, it was located and scanned by
Jennifer Giesbrecht, Assistant Editor of Vancouver magazine, and sent to me
for this site. The PDF is not OCR'd, just a visual scan, but it's perfectly
readable if you magnify it. The accompanying photos can't be made out. If
the original online text and photos can be located, they will be posted. (I
have the text of "Part 1" HERE but without the
pictures and of course the "Read more" link doesn't go anywhere, nor do any
of the others.) Meanwhile, you can also read some things about JJ in Mark
Rudd's website, and much more in this
Wikipedia page.)

Hond, Paul, “Stir
it Up”,
Columbia Magazine,
Spring 2008: An article about Paul Cronin's forthcoming documentary film
about the student uprising at Columbia, tentatively scheduled for release in
2017. As of December 2013 Paul had conducted more than 400 filmed
interviews with participants and witnesses. He estimates the film will last
15 hours.